Is the World Returning to the Dark Ages? | Salman Rushdie | Big Think

Is the World Returning to the Dark Ages?

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Well! Salman Rushdie pretty much predicted the future in his new book, The Golden House, wherein the antagonist is "a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and coloured hair." Read into that what you will, but Rushdie here posits that he's baffled by the sudden worldwide rejection of knowledge and the elites. He says that it's not just an invention of the American right wing — that it's a worldwide problem that's helped in large part by the likes of Fox News et al — and he wonders both what gave rise to that and how it will stop. Perhaps he'll have to write a sequel.

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SALMAN RUSHDIE:

Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist and writer, author of ten novels including Midnight’s Children (Booker Prize, 1981), Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House.

The publication of his fourth novel "The Satanic Verses" in 1988 led to violent protests in the Muslim world for its depiction of the prophet Mohammad. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a death fatwa against Rushdie, which sent him into hiding for nearly a decade. Rushdie weathered countless death threats and many assassination attempts.

In June 2007, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. In 2008 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Library Lion of the New York Public Library. In addition, "Midnight’s Children" was named the Best of the Booker—the best prize-winner in the award’s 40 year history—by a public vote. In 2008, The Times of London ranked Rushdie thirteenth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."

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TRANSCRIPT:

Salman Rushdie: Well, I saw a really alarming newspaper article just a week or so ago in which it was—some survey had shown that more than 50 percent of self-identifying Republicans believed that universities were bad for America, really that universities were actually a negative, harmful force in American life.

I mean I had never seen any group of people saying that before, so that was shocking.

And I do think this is not unique to America, because also in England there is a similar kind of distrust of expertise.

In the Brexit vote there—one of the things that came up over and over again was a dislike of experts “telling you what to think”.

And so somehow this mistrust of “people who know things” has become internationalized, it’s not just something about the American Right.

Obviously to somebody who has seen knowledge as being a great virtue and who has spent his life trying to accumulate little bits of it and somebody who thinks of knowledge as a kind of beauty, it’s very discomforting to say the least to have people who think of it as being suspicious. You know, um...

Because what’s happening it seems to me is a strange distortion of the idea of the elite.

If you ask me “What’s an elite?” I would think more about the many, many billionaires sitting in the Trump administration.

Here’s a government with more super-rich people in it than has ever been in any American government, and that government calls college professors and journalists elites.

We’re not the ones with private planes and golf courses in the Bahamas—relatively few novelists have these things. And the idea that we’re the elites, whereas that group, that kind of 0.1 of the 1 percent that considers itself to be in some way possessing the common touch, that just seems like an absurd comic inversion of reality.

I think one of the things we see at the moment, and I tried to in a way capture in the novel, is this idea of a world turned upside down, in which things that one thought of as being normal—solid, believable descriptions of reality—are being stood on their head everyday.

The idea of reality itself, the idea of truth is something verifiable and objective, all these things are being inverted and knocked off their pedestals.

Well, I mean there is a terrible thing which writers sometimes say to each other, which is, “The worse it is the better it is,” because when the world is in a terrible condition there’s a lot to write about.

I mean one demonstration of this is the literature, very often underground literature—the Samizdat literature of the Soviet Union was of an extraordinary quality when there was this colossal adversary of Soviet authoritarianism. Many writers, both in a fiction and nonfiction, r...

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